Alt Tags on multiple product images
-
Hi
I work on SEO for an ecommerce site and wanted to find out how important it is to optimise all images with alt tags.
We have alt tags in place, however have not optimised descriptions for the following example images:
Front of cupboard
Back of cupboard
Side of cupboard etc
Is this dangerous for SEO if these images all have the same alt tag?
We have thousands of products so it would be a huge job to update these, but if it's crucial for SEO we can work through our priorities.
Thank you!
-
Yes I was thinking of testing this.
I have just checked our images and from what I can see the devs have set the alt tag to default to the product title.
Then the image title is a bit more descriptive - does the image title/legend help with anything or should we ignore these and update alt tags instead?
-
Sorry Becky, I forgot to say that without some level of testing, it is almost impossible to say with any degree of certainty just what you would get from this as a site-wide task. Depending on the products, searches conducted and how Google ranks the images, you may find a good deal of additional traffic or you may find very little.
Perhaps take a control group to test and monitor the products over the course of a month to see if sales / traffic has increased.
-Andy
-
Do you still not need to optimise each different image?
-
Thank you this is really helpful!
-
Great thank you very much for your help!
-
Hi Becky,
You aren't likely to be penalised for this, but the benefit you can derive from ALT text will be lessened. If the picture is of a floor fan, and the ALT tag says this, there is no problem.
However, I would be saying something like "Metal Blizzard Floor Fan 12" 55W with tilt". It will help because you have more of a chance of it turning up in image searches = more traffic.
-Andy
-
Definitely a great idea is there is a dev on hand to do this
-Andy
-
Hi Becky,
Completely agreed with Andy's suggestion.I would like to add one more thing here I'm also working on a large e-commerce site with thousands of products. I find a good way to insert alt tag very easily I asked web developer to create a module by which every products having alt tag with product name and web developer did a great job by writing only few lines of code. you can ask web developer to do the same.
Now I don't need to add alt tag individually on each product and it saves my time.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Hi Andy
That's great thank you. I'm finding it harder to describe some products, which have very similar images. Say for instance, a fan at different angles.
Will I get penalised if Alt tags have the same name? So if say 3 images all have, floor fan? This is happening as a default at the moment, but I am looking into getting them updated - however if the benefit is small other tasks will be prioritised.
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
What you need to be careful of, is over optimising with ALT tags. This can lead to issues, but what you suggest is correct. John Mueller from Google had this to say about ALT tags...
"alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So if you have an image of a big blue pineapple chair you should use the alt tag that best describes it, which is alt=”big blue pineapple chair.”** title attribute** should be used when the image is a hyperlink to a specific page. The title attribute should contain information about what will happen when you click on the image. For example, if the image will get larger, it should read something like, title=”View a larger version of the big blue pineapple chair image.”
If the image someone can click on is the rear view of a cupboard, then say this in the ALT tag. However, it is worthwhile remembering that you need to be descriptive with these.
Here is a great article on the subject.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?
When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each? Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail? Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing... Notes: Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page. There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.
On-Page Optimization | | Ria_3 -
Multiple Addresses - Google places for business
Hi I need a little help, A client of ours has 4 business addresses and want to know, should we have all 4 in the footer of their website or should we just keep the relevant address to the relevant area page? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Mays-Digital0 -
Ecommerce Product Reviews - Show All, Most Recent, Sampling?
Just curious what you guys are doing in the way of displaying product reviews on ecommerce sites. I couldn't find much on best practices here so I'm turning to the Moz community. We're moving our main site to Magento and plan to launch it in a few months. Some of our products have 1,000+ reviews and we're wondering what the best way to show them is. I'm thinking just put them all on there (provided it doesn't slow down the page) to increase unique content per page, more keywords, etc. We've also thought of showing just the 50-100 most recent reviews or filtering the reviews and showing a sampling we choose. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Kingof50 -
H1 tag mandatory?
Hi there! Is a mandatory to fullfill the H1 tag in order to improve SEO? I mean I'm in the case where the keyword selected is appropiate to optimize the page but not appropiate to be in H1 tag 'cause it probably "doesn't sound good" to the user. Is it enought to be present in the url, title and description?Any suggestion? Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Flickr v. On-Site Images
My apologies in that I have searched for this, have seen discussions on it and haven't seen a definitive answer on the question of hosting & displaying on-domain images v. using a source like flickr to host all of your images. I have a client that is mostly a local search play in a very tourism heavy area. I'm investigating this option for a few reasons. 1. Ease of use. The new flickr app is brilliant. So if he's out giving a tour, takes a picture, it can be seamlessly integrated to his account & then shot off to all of his portals (website, facebook, twitter, etc.). It's a small client & he's not tech savvy, so this option suits him very well. 2. SEO. With all of the tagging, geo components, and it playing nice with Google Images search, I thought this was a viable option in hosting the majority of his on-site images. I've seen opinions on this before. But I was wondering if there any further opinions on the subject. Not sure if there's anything 'definitive', but any help or insight would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | BrianWhitaker0 -
Why are my tags causing duplicate error?
Hi, When I run an SEO moz crawl it is picking up duplicate errors from my tags. Currently I have these set as domain url/tag/name of the tag. Is this incorrect? Is there anything I can do to stop this being picked up as duplicate pages? Thanks, Eliz
On-Page Optimization | | econley0 -
How to optimize for a product by two names
So let us assume I am selling an item on my website and it comes in a large array of varieties. Let us also assume that this item is commonly referred to by two different names. (i.e. Cover & Case, Car & Automobile, Notepad & Notebook) Both of these names that are used, in regards to this product, have, for the sake of argument here, the exact same search volume. I want to make sure that I rank for both terms. In my Title Tags I am currently thinking about the following methodology to help that cause. "GE Motors Super Fast and Awesome Car / Automobile" "Ghostwriter Kids Notebook / Notepad" "Super Soft Pillow Cover / Case" Notice I have the space in between the words and the / but my question is if this is necessary or not? What is Google's policy on how they view that / ? Can I do this and still have Google see it as two different words? "GE Motors Super Fast and Awesome Car/Automobile" "Ghostwriter Kids Notebook/Notepad" "Super Soft Pillow Cover/Case" Apologies if this is a fairly basic question but cannot seem to find this information.
On-Page Optimization | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Title Tag Over Optimization
Hey, I've read that adding the company name to the title tag was a waste of space since the more words the less weight each one has, with all this over optimization preventive measures, should I rewrite the title tags format with company names? and if so should it be (company name): (naturally organized keywords) (naturally organized keyword) | (Company name). or can I keep it just naturally organized keywords Also I used to do (keyphrase) - (keyphrase) instead of commas, should I fix this? I asked this question on Randy's post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday but didn't really get an answer. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nrv0